Since 2004, Hollywood has been working to adapt the Deborah Moggach novel Tulip Fever, which has long been seen as a major prestige project with Oscar potential. Tom Stoppard, the legendary British playwright, wrote the screenplay for the final iteration of the film. The movie stars three Academy Award winners (Alicia Vikander, Judi Dench, and Christoph Waltz), along with up-and-coming stars like Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne. Footage from the film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival ... in May 2015. Now, after untold delays, it’s coming out, packaged as “the year’s sexiest thriller.”

Two years after Tulip Fever was first scheduled for release, audiences will finally be able to see it in theaters. But the film, out Friday, isn’t being screened for critics, and the release strategy is reminiscent of someone being snuck out the back door in hopes of attracting as little attention as possible. It’s a fittingly strange ending to one of the most mysteriously drawn-out productions in recent film memory—but so many questions remain. What happened to Tulip Fever along the way, to transmogrify it from high-end awards contender to a studio’s secret shame? And will the fuss around its delayed release actually help in drawing eyeballs to a movie that might otherwise have been dismissed as a staid costume drama?

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Moggach’s book is set in the Netherlands in the 17th century, at the height of “tulip mania,” a phenomenon where the recently introduced flower became the hottest ticket in Europe before the speculative market around it collapsed in 1637 (not unlike so many a dot-com bubble hundreds of years later). DeHaan plays an artist, Jan Van Loos, who falls for married society woman Sophia (Vikander) when he’s contracted to paint her. Together, they invest in the tulip market in an effort to make enough money to escape from the clutches of her domineering husband Cornelis (Waltz).

You’d be forgiven for thinking that doesn’t exactly sound like a box office barn-burner. But the novel was once a hot Hollywood property, optioned by Steven Spielberg and initially planned as a $48 million DreamWorks production in 2004, directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) and starring Jude Law, Keira Knightley (or perhaps Natalie Portman), and Jim Broadbent. The film was in active pre-production, with sets built and some 12,000 tulips planted, when the U.K. government closed a tax loophole and the financing collapsed. Those 12,000 bulbs, Moggach said, were given to her friends and neighbors in London, sprouting everywhere as a reminder of a film that never was.

Moggach isn’t some Hollywood neophyte: She wrote the screenplay for the 2005 Pride and Prejudice and saw her novel These Foolish Things adapted into the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. So there remained interest in Tulip Fever, which was finally resurrected as a film by the mega-producer Harvey Weinstein. Though its budget was lower, at $25 million, Weinstein still assembled a big cast and hired Stoppard to work on the script; many more tulips were planted, and the film was finally committed to celluloid in 2014. That, usually, would have been the end of that.

Tulip Fever was first slotted for a November 2015 release, capitalizing on Vikander’s emergence as a star (she won an Oscar for The Danish Girl, which came out that fall). Then it was moved to July 2016. Then February 2017, seemingly acknowledging that the film had limited awards potential, coupled with rumors that The Weinstein Company, which produced the film, was lacking in funds to mount several major releases every year. Just before its February release, the film was punted again, down to August, and in some strange final indignity, it was shoved to September 1, where it will (reportedly) finally debut in semi-limited release.

The journey of Tulip Fever is a sort of Hollywood eclipse.

Some journalists have attended screenings throughout the years; many more audiences have been subjected to untold test screenings, with Weinstein and the director Justin Chadwick trying out various cuts. But this new edition has been largely kept under wraps. A Writers Guild of America screening was canceled, at the last minute; the horror film Annabelle: Creation was reportedly shown instead. The film’s advertising strategy, such as it is, is suddenly emphasizing that Tulip Fever is a steamy sex thriller, a far cry from the tony Stoppard-penned costume drama it was originally pitched as. Soon, audiences will be able to decide for themselves.

The journey of Tulip Fever is a sort of Hollywood eclipse, an occasional phenomenon that has no wider bearing on the industry but is the kind of unusual, fascinating spectacle that draws in some committed film fans. Something similar happened with David O. Russell’s Nailed, a 2008 comedy starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Biel that was disowned by its director and eventually released as Accidental Love in 2015, making only a few thousand dollars at the box office. There was also Serena, an epic drama starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, which took almost two years to make it to theaters and was barely noticed upon release.

But Tulip Fever seems special even by that yardstick. It’s a film that, more likely than not, was never anything more than ordinary—an Oscar player that missed the mark, hardly an unusual phenomenon in any given year. But all this fuss over its mysterious release has turned it into a genuine curio, the kind of potential camp-fest that will be remembered for years simply because of the circumstances of its production. We’ll finally know how good, or bad, Tulip Fever is on Friday. But the real thrill for this one has been in the wait.

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Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer.

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A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.

The greatest threats to free speech in America come from the state, not from activists on college campuses.

The American left is waging war on free speech. That’s the consensus from center-left to far right; even Nazis and white supremacists seek to wave the First Amendment like a bloody shirt. But the greatest contemporary threat to free speech comes not from antifa radicals or campus leftists, but from a president prepared to use the power and authority of government to chill or suppress controversial speech, and the political movement that put him in office, and now applauds and extends his efforts.

The most frequently cited examples of the left-wing war on free speech are the protests against right-wing speakers that occur on elite college campuses, some of which have turned violent.New York’s Jonathan Chait has described the protests as a “war on the liberal mind” and the “manifestation of a serious ideological challenge to liberalism—less serious than the threat from the right, but equally necessary to defeat.” Most right-wing critiques fail to make such ideological distinctions, and are far more apocalyptic—some have unironically proposed state laws that define how universities are and are not allowed to govern themselves in the name of defending free speech.

A growing body of research debunks the idea that school quality is the main determinant of economic mobility.

One of the most commonly taught stories American schoolchildren learn is that of Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s 19th-century tale of a poor, ambitious teenaged boy in New York City who works hard and eventually secures himself a respectable, middle-class life. This “rags to riches” tale embodies one of America’s most sacred narratives: that no matter who you are, what your parents do, or where you grow up, with enough education and hard work, you too can rise the economic ladder.

A body of research has since emerged to challenge this national story, casting the United States not as a meritocracy but as a country where castes are reinforced by factors like the race of one’s childhood neighbors and how unequally income is distributed throughout society. One such study was published in 2014, by a team of economists led by Stanford’s Raj Chetty. After analyzing federal income tax records for millions of Americans, and studying, for the first time, the direct relationship between a child’s earnings and that of their parents, they determined that the chances of a child growing up at the bottom of the national income distribution to ever one day reach the top actually varies greatly by geography. For example, they found that a poor child raised in San Jose, or Salt Lake City, has a much greater chance of reaching the top than a poor child raised in Baltimore, or Charlotte. They couldn’t say exactly why, but they concluded that five correlated factors—segregation, family structure, income inequality, local school quality, and social capital—were likely to make a difference. Their conclusion: America is land of opportunity for some. For others, much less so.

One hundred years ago, a retail giant that shipped millions of products by mail moved swiftly into the brick-and-mortar business, changing it forever. Is that happening again?

Amazon comes to conquer brick-and-mortar retail, not to bury it. In the last two years, the company has opened 11 physical bookstores. This summer, it bought Whole Foods and its 400 grocery locations. And last week, the company announced a partnership with Kohl’s to allow returns at the physical retailer’s stores.

Why is Amazon looking more and more like an old-fashioned retailer? The company’s do-it-all corporate strategy adheres to a familiar playbook—that of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Sears might seem like a zombie today, but it’s easy to forget how transformative the company was exactly 100 years ago, when it, too, was capitalizing on a mail-to-consumer business to establish a physical retail presence.

The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.

It is insufficient to statethe obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

What the Trump administration has been threatening is not a “preemptive strike.”

Donald Trump lies so frequently and so brazenly that it’s easy to forget that there are political untruths he did not invent. Sometimes, he builds on falsehoods that predated his election, and that enjoy currency among the very institutions that generally restrain his power.

That’s the case in the debate over North Korea. On Monday, The New York Timesdeclared that “the United States has repeatedly suggested in recent months” that it “could threaten pre-emptive military action” against North Korea. On Sunday, The Washington Post—after asking Americans whether they would “support or oppose the U.S. bombing North Korean military targets” in order “to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons”—announced that “Two-thirds of Americans oppose launching a preemptive military strike.” Citing the Post’s findings, The New York Times the same day reported that Americans are “deeply opposed to the kind of pre-emptive military strike” that Trump “has seemed eager to threaten.”

National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17.

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More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

His delicate new song makes the problems of fame shockingly relatable.

If ever there were a time when the world could use more songs about the stresses of being rich and famous, the era of Drake and Taylor Swift 2.0 would not seem to be it. And yet even the most played-out topic can be made interesting again through talent and craftsmanship, as Chance the Rapper reminded America Monday night on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

The 24-year-old Chicagoan told Colbert, with whom he recently collaborated on the politically-charged opening medley for the Emmys, that the song he was about to premiere was written entirely in the last few days. On one hand, a quick turnaround might explain the spare sound and straightforward structure of the untitled track. But on the other, it’s mindbendingly impressive if the tune’s bracing poetry and melody wereindeed just tossed-off.